Vortex. Part 16

VORTEX Part 16

I knew that we had to enter the tower; parts could be stored there that might make a repair possible. Fortunately, we had several laser drills on board and enough explosives in the missiles of our weapons bays to blow the tower into tiny rubble, but I only wanted to blast open a small entrance. In the meantime, the underside of the Alpha was no hotter than 30 degrees, and the water around it had already taken on that temperature too, so I was ready to disembark and position the explosive devices prepared by Vahanara. Why did nobody ever think of taking diving suits aboard a spaceship? Just because the idea is too absurd? Perhaps! But it would have made my task much easier, since without a diving suit I could only stay underwater for fifteen minutes.

The water was pleasant; only the floating body parts were somewhat disturbing. Only without a screen could I imagine the true scale of the cylinder. It was only a few meters high, but its outer diameter was nearly a hundred meters. I couldn't imagine what such a structure might be needed for.

I had sketched out on a foil where the explosive charge should be installed. Only after three minutes did I find the spot and could finally attach it there. The outer wall of the building consisted of an alloy I had only ever seen on Juventa before, a microstructured organic metal. That could mean it was a computer complex covered with a sentient "skin".

Information in this situation wasn't as valuable as tools, but using the elements of a computer I had once built an electrograv on Terra Prime before. For me, it was the spare parts that counted.

The explosion tore the cylinder apart with as much ease as if it were made of cardboard. All the water flowed into the cylinder, and since an ice layer had already formed above ALPHA, no new water could pour in and we gained some time. Through my wrist computer I established contact with the ship:

"- This is Varlon, I've blasted a hole into it. Tero, A-Tya and Vahanara, please come in; the others will start restoring the drive, and make damn sure you guard Jessie!"

The exit hatch of the ALPHA, through which assault troops were normally dropped in earlier versions, opened up. Vahanara slid out first and fell right on her face in front of me, cursing.

"- You didn't foresee that, did you?", I asked her cynically and full of gloating.

"- There are limits to my power as well. I should have just worn different shoes.", she replied.

Tero slid skillfully toward the blasted hole and looked inside:

"- Holy crap!", she shouted in shock, "- Take a look at this!"

We all crowded around the hole and looked inside; it was impressive. On the inside, a winding platform led downward, and each floor, which was five meters below the other, was brightly illuminated by a centrally located lighting tube and neon-tube-like bodies hanging on the side walls. Everything was beautifully lit, all the way to the bottom; however, it went kilometers beneath the planet's surface.

Vahanara was the first to enter the cylinder and began feeling the walls. The walls, white at first glance, turned out to be a kind of cryogenic sleep chambers. It was very cold in here, but my curiosity made me forget that; I opened one of the chambers and took a closer look at the body lying inside. It was a male humanoid of the same race as the mannequin found in the underground city on Sek. The history of the war seemed to be true.

Vahanara came over to me and looked at the body as well, then she said to me:

"- Brush the hair aside."

I did so, first on the body of the unknown man, then on myself. It was unbelievable; he was evidently connected to a brain-linking machine similar to the Juventans'.

"- Don't even think about it!", Vahanara shouted and pushed me back.

She had known it even before I had decided to enter the connection. The catastrophe on Juventa was still fresh in her mind as if it had been yesterday. She would not accept the argument that it had been the work of the Ectomorphs.

"- But Vahanara, what is this all about? They've been dead for centuries! So what harm is there if I surf around in their memories for a bit?", I asked.

"- They aren't dead at all! It's just a state of suspended animation, and I know that the network is still working. If you want to kill them and yourself, I won't stop you. However, if I may make a suggestion: use a human for it. A human would be compatible with the system, because after all, these people here used to be humans once, too."

"- And where am I supposed to get a human from right now?", I asked, somewhat angrily.

"- We have Jessie, after all!", A-Tya chimed in.

"- Jessie belongs to Master Force, I can't trust those traitors."

Vahanara pulled me down and grabbed my arm so hard that I feared it might break. I would never have expected such strength from her. She merely said:

"- You can trust her!"

"- Alright, fine, but finally let go of my arm, you're hurting me!", I whined in pain, noticing Tero giggling.

When Vahanara let go, I contacted the ship and said Jessie's guards should bring her down here.

* * *

Jessie stared at me with little understanding and said:

"- You damned bastard, you don't really expect me to entrust my brain to a five-hundred-year-old machine, and with my broken ribs to boot?"

"- I'm not a bastard. Bastards at least had parents; I, on the other hand, never had any. That may be where my lack of manners when dealing with you humans stems from, but I can assure you that I won't hesitate to kill you if you don't do what I want."

Jessie opened her mouth to say something, but was so flabbergasted that she didn't know which word to start with. Tero, on the other hand, knew what to do. She gave me a ringing slap across the face. It was the second time my sister had hit me.

I pulled Tero aside and asked her angrily:

"- What's that supposed to mean? We originated from one and the same amoeba cell, we shouldn't be fighting!"

"- If you treat my friend Jessie so badly, don't be surprised!"

"- Well, well, so you've become friends with a traitor. You ought to know me better, I would never put her in danger."

"- First of all, she isn't a traitor but a very good friend, and secondly, you've never been goodness personified. I hope you still remember what happened two years before your flight to Juventa?"

I felt embarrassed that back then I had almost killed a Wednarian woman when she stole my wallet. She was just a victim of circumstances herself. I had avoided planet Wedna ever since; fortunately, a natural wormhole there never opened again. Since I was thoroughly embarrassed, I tried to change the subject:

"- Aha, so you're playing Jessie's protector! Or is she some kind of daughter substitute for you?"

Oh boy, now I had touched a sore spot; she was infertile, and donkey that I am, I had forgotten.

With a spine-chilling scream, Tero turned into a fighting beast and leaped at me. One of the other Zer was just barely able to hold her back before she could rip my heart out.

I walked back to Jessie as fast as I could and fitted the interface to her. She looked at me fiercely and asked:

"- Has anyone ever told you that you have a strange way of dealing with women?"

Vahanara, Tya, and Tero said simultaneously:

"- Absolutely!"

My face flushed red; they were all right, and I had known it for a long time. It only surprised me that A-Tya was of the same opinion. Vahanara patched Jessie's brain connection into the network. She immediately closed her eyes and would have almost fallen over if I hadn't caught her. Now all we could do was wait.

* * *

Jessie snapped her eyes open and tore the connection cable from her head. Ten hours had passed, and fearing that Jessie might freeze to death, I put my jacket on her.

She looked at me and then put on her sunglasses. On her cheeks I noticed several tears.

"- What happened?", Vahanara asked.

Jessie pulled her sunglasses down a bit and then said to me:

"- It seems I owe you an apology, and in many respects. This machine is apparently very important to you, because with it I was able to see the future."

"- And what did you learn?"

"- Only two important things that will interest you. Var, you will save the planet Earth, but it will end fatally for you."

"- What do you mean by that? Earth has been destroyed, there is nothing left to save. Quite apart from that, how am I supposed to die as long as I still have the chip inside me?"

"- Trust me, all the people lying in these chambers used to be clairvoyants, and there are still cylinders with scientists, chroniclers, and other professions. The clairvoyants showed me that you will travel into the past."

Suddenly she coughed, spitting up blood.

"- It's nothing.", she said when she saw the blood, then Jessie fell to the floor.

I rushed to her immediately and scanned her body with the wrist computer. It indicated bleeding in the lungs and in the brain, though not caused by the neural interface, but by a biovirus.

Jessie opened her eyes one last time and said very softly:

"- If you save Earth, this will never happen and I will live, but we will never see each other again. I'm sorry that I doubted your intentions."

Her heart stopped beating. I was still holding her body, stunned and unable to speak. On the one hand, I regretted that she had died so young; on the other, I myself was afraid of death.

Tero took Jessie's body and carried her back to the ship, leaving me standing rooted to the spot. Minutes passed

...utes until Tya woke me from that state:

"— Do you think it is dangerous for me too?"

"— What? Oh, the bacteria? No, it is a biovirus that is apparently tuned only to humans, otherwise you would have been dead long ago. I still can't grasp that Jessie is dead!"

"— Neither can I, but don't forget that if what she said is true, it will soon be your turn too, and I don't want to have to witness that."

"— But darling, what could the chances be that I travel into the past and lose my immortality chip there? I think that is just one possibility out of many thousands that doesn't have to come true at all."

A-Tya was very unsettled, and if I had kept a bit of composure, I could have searched through Jessie's memory. Now it was already too late, however, and the memory prions had decayed down to basic knowledge like reading or writing. Somehow I tackled everything with a bit less energy now; I simply missed Jessie, but life had to go on somehow.

We searched all the empty chambers for usable electronic components in order to reactivate ALPHA's drive. The temperatures kept falling further and frustration spread among all of us, because what we had found was not quite enough to repair the Alpha.

Apparently the Elnorians did not know several electronic components that were urgently needed. In vain, I had already been searching for hours for a tetrystor, but evidently this was something unknown on Earth and on Elnor, so that in the end I had to assemble this complicated chip from several hundred transistors, thyristors, triacs, and diodes, although the switching speed was unfortunately very low, but just barely fast enough to perform course changes via brain probe.

One fact pleased me about all that soldering: the soldering iron at least provided some warmth, and I needed that desperately.

A-Tya came to me and asked:

"— Shouldn't we try to go further down? The central processor must be installed somewhere."

I stood up shivering and looked over the edge of the platform into the depths, then I pointed down and asked:

"— And how many years do you want to be on the way there? Our food supplies won't last that long, and I have no intention of eating Jessie."

"— You're slowly developing a human soul!", Tya said, surprised.

"— No insults, please! I don't know what it is, but previously I would even have eaten Tero if she had died, even if my fridge had been full; now, despite the hunger, I cannot eat Jessie."

Speaking of fridges. The water that had penetrated through our hole had frozen over in the meantime and formed a slippery surface, so that I was afraid someone could fall off. The oh-so-brilliant designers of the cylinder had forgotten to build a railing.

My tetrystor was finally finished, and I gave it to one of the Zer working on the drive. Everything on the ship looked like patchwork, but slowly it was becoming airworthy again and we would be able to melt our way through the layers of snow with our laser weapons. At last, these weapons were proving useful for something.

Next, I wanted to perform some repairs on the main computer, and needed Vahanara for that, who was responsible for its development; I could not find her, however. In the end, I asked one of the technicians:

"— Have you seen Vahanara?"

"— Yes, she wanted to fetch a few more components from the cylinder."

A bad premonition welled up inside me; Vahanara had already slipped once before in those shoes, and after all, the entire platform was now frozen over.

In a panic, I rushed out of the ship toward the cylinder and indeed, through the hole, I could already see Vahanara losing her balance. With a mighty leap, I landed beside her at the very last second and grabbed hold of her. As bad luck would have it, I slipped too, and together with Vahanara fell down one floor, where I managed to cling to the platform edge with just one hand, holding Vahanara with the other.

I believed myself safe and was just trying to climb back up, but the painful rays from the planet's interior began to take effect again, and since I was very close to the source, the effect was correspondingly severe. I cramped up in agony; Vahanara wasn't faring much better. We both let go and plummeted into the bottomless void.

From my wrist computer, I shot out a thin cable with high load capacity, but it couldn't latch onto anything and recoiled. Horrified, I watched the ceiling recede further and further away from me; the ground, on the other hand, I could not yet see.

A fall from this height would end fatally even for a Genomorph, which is why I feared for Vahanara. Thanks to the regeneration chip, not too much could happen to me myself, except that my next self might turn evil. The prophecy also said that I would die in a different way.

It grew warmer and warmer, and the atmospheric pressure kept rising. The middle fluorescent tube also seemed to shine brighter than the section way at the top.

We had already been falling for several minutes and an end was still nowhere in sight. Since, just like Vahanara, I hadn't eaten anything for hours, I didn't have enough nutrients to support my cells during morphing, otherwise I would have long since altered my body shape to make it far more aerodynamically inefficient, and thus slow the speed of the fall; but as it was, I had no choice but to use the old skydiver's trick. Arms and legs spread apart to increase drag. Vahanara saw that I was losing a little speed, and so she did the exact same thing as me.

Suddenly, with incredible speed, the shiny base plate appeared.

End